Globalization, Indigenism, And the Politics of Place‪.‬

I take up below some questions raised by the term "indigenous." If we seem to spend more time speaking about words these days than about the world to which the words refer, there is good reason for it. A period of radical change, especially radical change in conceptions and practices of politics, generates transformations in the meaning of the terms with which we seek to comprehend those changes; transformations that arise not only from the changes themselves but also, and more importantly, from the appropriation of concepts for competing political projects, and the discursive conflicts to which they give rise. The war the United States has launched in Iraq may be unprecedented for the attention its perpetrators have devoted to questions of vocabulary, which in turn is tied in with their concerns about possible legal and propaganda repercussions of the choice of vocabulary in describing the war and its consequences. Even imperialism, it seems, needs in our day to be mindful of consequences. This war may point to the future in this regard, as it does in so many others, as it may be the most dramatic (because legally dubious) instance to date of the subjection of political to legal issues, which itself disguises the manipulation of international law in the name of national interest, if not the interests of an unusually unscrupulous fraction of a corporate and fanatical religious cabal that has usurped the national interest. These are times, to recall the Analects of Confucius, that call for zhengming, the "rectification of names," if we keep in mind that what is at issue is not the truth of names, as Confucius would have it, but some measure of clarity in our political and cultural discourses. Indigenous, like globalization, with which it has been paired in the present project, may be understood in a variety of ways with different political consequences. I am most interested here in the gap between the sense of indigenous that informs this volume, something relativistic, along the lines of "the local"--as in "the global and the local"--and another, more grounded, sense of indigenous, that derives its meaning not from its contrast with the global, but from substantial autonomous claims to a content that foregrounds an almost absolute attachment to place understood concretely. While grounded in place, this latter sense of indigenous nevertheless challenges the global with its own holistic claims. I suggest below that such an understanding of "indigenous," which has acquired visibility in tandem with "globalization," offers more radical possibilities for political critique than is allowed for in those critiques that take as their premise the nation or the "third world," which perpetuates a culturalist power politics without questioning the foundations of unequal power.